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  “Do you have her schedule handy?”

  The manager reached over to a swinging file system on the corner of the desk and pulled a folder from near the back. “Here.”

  Will looked through it while Carina asked, “Do you know if Angie was dating someone? Who her close friends were? If anyone has been giving her problems here at work?”

  “She’s been seeing this guy Doug Masterson. I told her to watch out for him after I had to kick him out for trying to sell drugs on the premises. I told her he wasn’t welcome, and if I found out she let him come in when I was off, I’d fire her. I didn’t want to, but this is a clean place. I want to keep it that way.” He paused and asked in a voice tinged with worry, “What happened? You wouldn’t be here unless something happened to Angie.”

  Carina answered. “Angie’s body was found on the beach early this morning.”

  “Her body? You mean she’s dead?”

  Burns seemed genuinely surprised and hurt by the news. But, as Carina thought while interviewing Steve Thomas, killers were skilled in deception.

  “Angie worked Friday night.” Will said. “Were you here?”

  He nodded. “I close on the weekends. It’s busy and I don’t like the girls handling the cash at night. I know, that sounds sexist, and I’ve had more than one girl give me a hard time about it, but I’d rather do the bank drops, you know what I mean?”

  “The streets are dangerous,” Will agreed, glancing down at the schedule. “It says Angie worked from four to ten.”

  “Yeah, but she was hanging out with some friends until much later.”

  “Until when?”

  “I’m not sure, but at least midnight. That’s when her ex-boyfriend came in and I had to escort him out.” He shook his head. “Angie really knows how to pick them. Dammit, I should have talked to her, done something to, hell, I don’t know.”

  A knock on the door interrupted Carina’s next question.

  Burns leaned over and slid open the door. “What’s up?”

  A tall, clean-cut teen, probably a college student like most of the employees at the Shack, looked at Carina and Will curiously. “Uh, Kyle, the Pepsi guy’s here. He wants you to sign off on the new order.”

  “Tell him I’ll be out in five minutes. Go ahead and put the stock away, I trust you’ll make sure everything’s there.”

  The kid nodded, hesitating as if he were going to ask something, then slid the door closed.

  “Anything else?” Burns asked.

  “You said you escorted Angie’s ex-boyfriend out. Do you know his name?”

  “Steve Thomas. A couple weeks ago he came in when Angie was on duty and they got into a huge fight, both of them yelling. The next day, Angie tells me she filed a restraining order against him.”

  “Do you remember what the argument was about?”

  “I’m not sure, but the rumors going around were that Steve still had the hots for Angie and lectured her about Masterson. Angie doesn’t like being told what to do and who to date, but Steve was right on the money about that low-life Masterson.” He sighed and suddenly looked older than what Carina had pegged as twenty-five. “I liked Angie, but the men she dated were all too old for her. Steve has to be nearly forty. Masterson is over thirty. There were at least four or five other guys Angie brought in since she started working here last summer, all of them over thirty.” He shook his head, frowning.

  “On Friday,” Carina asked, “what time did Angie leave?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably shortly after I escorted Steve out, which was just after midnight. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t give me a bad time.”

  “What did he say?”

  Burns paused, thinking. “I think he said, ‘Tell Angie to be careful.’ ”

  Outside, Carina and Will called into dispatch to update the patrol watching Steve’s apartment. Carina turned to Will. “Steve Thomas flat-out lied to us. He said ten, Burns says midnight.”

  “And just put himself at the top of the suspect list.”

  Maybe he was being paranoid, but he went home during lunch to double check that there was nothing of Angie’s left in his room.

  There was a smell, something that hadn’t been there before. He went to the bathroom, pulled a can of Lysol disinfectant from under the sink, and sprayed it in the bathroom, bedroom, and then everywhere else. Just in case.

  He’d made his bed with fresh linens before he left. Now he sat down and looked around. Everything was neat, organized, as it should be.

  He reached into his nightstand drawer and pulled out a metal box, about the size of a shoe box, and ran his fingers over the combination lock until it sprang open.

  Inside were pictures, a couple small jars, a knife, a few other items that held special importance for him.

  And a faded birthday card from his father, still in the envelope postmarked Corcoran Prison.

  He didn’t look at the card, which was underneath everything else. Instead, he picked up the newest addition to the box, Angie’s navel ring.

  The first time he’d seen the navel ring he’d been at the Sand Shack and she’d walked in, off-duty, wearing a bikini top and short-shorts. He stared, he couldn’t help it. It was like a light was shining on her, a bright light, and everything became clear.

  He knew Angie. She and his online fantasy were one and the same.

  He didn’t need to confirm it, but he did. Right there. He couldn’t wait until he went home. He logged onto a computer—the Shack had several hookups—and went to MyJournal.com. Click, click, click.

  There.

  The navel ring, one of the “A for Anonymous” pictures, right there next to the journal entry where she described what it was like to give a guy a blow job.

  Half the college girls had navel rings, but Angie’s was unique. A gold hoop with three hanging charms—a seashell, a leaf, and a rose.

  The same as the picture.

  But if that wasn’t enough to convince him that he knew his fantasy girl, she also sported the same rose tattoo on her breast, revealed by her bikini.

  Angie was the slut.

  He went home, read Angie’s online diary again. His fantasies, which had been only that, untouchable, were now in clear focus.

  She was meant to be his. It was as if some god had thrown all the pieces to the puzzle in his lap and he’d finally put it together.

  Angie was a whore, a slut. Cut from the same cloth as the whore who’d lied about his father. On the surface, Angie was nice, sweet, polite. Almost demure. But in private she revealed her true self, talking about her sexual relations with nearly a dozen men over the last six months.

  Fucking hypocrite whore.

  And she walked right into his trap. It was obviously meant to be, everything. His plan worked, from setup to execution.

  She had walked right up to him, smiled. “I came as soon as I could.”

  He’d driven to his place. She hadn’t even thought to question it. The lie he’d told her was so believable she didn’t doubt his sincerity for a minute.

  It wasn’t until they were inside that he saw a brief look of panic. He gave her a Coke.

  Twenty minutes later she was unconscious. When she woke up, she was tied to his bed, her mouth glued shut, naked. His penis grew hard from the vision of Angie so vulnerable, shivering and trying to scream.

  He shook his head, clearing the memories. He was going to be late for class. He locked up his treasures and rushed out.

  He’d let himself fully remember Angie and his methodical breaking of her spirit later. Tonight. When he could enjoy it.

  FIVE

  WILL AND CARINA were fifteen minutes late for Angie Vance’s autopsy, and Chen had gone ahead and prepped the body.

  “What did we miss?” Carina pulled on a smock and latex gloves, though she had no intention of touching the body.

  “The next of kin left thirty minutes ago, so you haven’t missed much. I just started.”

  “That was fast,” Carina said to Will. “She must
have come down right after we left her.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Will asked her.

  Carina hated facing death, but she would want to know with every certainty. She’d need to see the truth with her own eyes.

  Chen motioned for them to approach the table. “Something interesting I noticed as soon as I started the visual examination. Someone washed her body before she died.” Chen stood at Angie’s feet, a laser pen in hand.

  “Why?”

  “That’s your job, not mine. There was soap residue under her arms and in her hair. I sent samples to the lab. But the body was cleaned, no doubt in my mind. From the moisture in her skin I’d say she was wrapped in the bags shortly after the bath.”

  “Why would he clean the body?” Carina asked, almost to herself. “To get rid of evidence?”

  “Very likely,” Will said, though Carina’s question had been more rhetorical.

  “Creepy,” she said. “And planned. He held her captive, raped her, kept her under his control for forty-eight hours, then he releases her to wash her before killing? Why not kill her, then wash her body? It would be easier. She wouldn’t be able to fight back.”

  “She may have been too weak to fight,” Will offered, “or drugged.”

  Chen said, “We’ve sent blood samples to the lab and will collect tissue and stomach contents during the exam.” He pointed the laser pen at her ankles and then her wrists. “She was restrained with rope, you can see the rope burns on her limbs. I was able to find a couple fibers embedded in her skin that hadn’t been washed away. Probably nylon or a cotton fiber, not hemp.”

  Carina had been avoiding Angie’s face, but now that Chen had turned his attention to her mouth, she had to look.

  The bandanna had been removed, though threads of it still clung to her lips, which were grotesque, purple and red pulp. Her neck was bruised as well, though it didn’t look like hand or finger marks, which would be one sign of possible strangulation. Her open eyes showed burst blood vessels. Not all suffocation deaths showed reticular hemorrhaging, which was why many nursing home or infant murders were deemed natural causes attributed to old age or sudden infant death syndrome. But Angie’s death was not peaceful. She had fought for every breath, the evidence of her failure still in her eyes.

  “The glue was an industrial-strength superglue of some sort. I’ve never seen this before in my career. Because the skin is a porous surface, glue would be absorbed in the skin and wouldn’t hold its strength for an extended period of time. Because the skin is constantly losing cells, eventually the glue would flake off. But the addition of the bandanna gave the glue something to adhere to.”

  He directed their attention to the victim’s overall appearance. “She hadn’t been fed or given fluid in at least forty-eight hours. She has obvious signs of dehydration.” The signs weren’t obvious to Carina, but she took Chen’s word for it. “I’m certain when we get inside I can confirm that. But there’re two things that are odd.”

  Odd? This could get weirder?

  Chen directed the laser to her stomach. “Bruising takes several minutes to hours to form depending on the trauma. Bruising is a constantly changing process, the color and size and depth of the injury growing, then shrinking and fading. Her stomach and upper chest appear to have the beginning signs of bruising. Very faint.”

  “Faint?” Will said. “I can’t see anything.”

  Carina focused on the areas Chen indicated. She’d never have noticed anything unusual until he pointed out the very slight discoloration. “What can cause that?” she asked.

  “Any number of things. And it happened around the time of death. Bruising stops after the heart stops beating. Something heavy was placed on her, perhaps to facilitate her death or to keep her body from convulsing.”

  A horrific thought came to Carina. “Could the killer have laid on top of her?”

  “Yes,” Chen said, a rare sigh coming from deep in his chest. “It’s cases like this that make me think about early retirement,” he said quietly, looking at Angie’s face.

  “What’s the second odd thing?”

  He pointed the laser at her navel. “She recently had a navel ring ripped out. It had begun to heal, so I’d guess it was removed twenty-four to forty-eight hours before her death.”

  He turned his attention from the tear in the navel to the two detectives on the other side of the table. “Ready?”

  No, Carina thought, but nodded along with Will. They silently observed Chen’s meticulous internal examination, his assistant following orders expeditiously.

  By the end of the autopsy, they had learned and confirmed several important facts:

  Angela Vance had been raped multiple times. There was extensive tearing and deep tissue damage in both orifices, indicating that a sharp, foreign object had penetrated. There was no biological evidence. The killer could have used a condom. If he didn’t, that evidence had probably been destroyed or contaminated when he cleaned the body.

  Chen collected possible trace evidence, tissue samples, and additional blood samples to send to the lab. He confirmed that she hadn’t eaten in at least twelve hours because her stomach was void of food.

  Jim Gage joined them halfway through the autopsy and confirmed that Angie had suffocated in the bag. While the tox screen was clean, the additional tissue and blood samples would be sent to the county lab, which could test for a broader array of drugs. Jim also collected hair samples to test for cocaine to determine whether Steve Thomas’s accusation that Masterson was feeding her the drug had merit. If she took cocaine more than a week earlier, it wouldn’t show up in her blood, but it would show up in her hair follicles.

  Not that drug use would prove Masterson was responsible for her death, but they never knew what information was important or incidental until they closed the case.

  Time of death was fixed at approximately one a.m. Monday, with an hour window on either side.

  “Fucking bastard,” Will mumbled as they left the morgue, the bright afternoon sunlight assaulting them when they stepped outside the cool building.

  “You can say that again.” Jim Gage joined them on the walk back to the police station, though his laboratory was around the corner in the opposite direction.

  “By the way,” Carina asked Jim, “did you find a navel ring in the evidence collected at the beach? It might look like a regular earring.”

  “We found no jewelry whatsoever.”

  “I wonder if the killer kept it,” Carina speculated.

  “Or it was pulled out in a struggle,” Jim suggested. “Dr. Chen is sending over the evidence priority and I’ll rush it as best I can. It would help if you get a suspect in custody; my unit has sixteen cases up for trial in the next two months that I need to prioritize.”

  “We have a suspect,” Carina said.

  “Come by later, I’ll try to give you a better time line.”

  “Sure.”

  She thought Jim’s comment was odd, since she was always coming by the lab for reports on her cases, but she realized how strange when Jim added, “If you come by after five, maybe we can go out for drinks later.”

  “Um, okay.”

  They were outside the main police doors when Jim turned and walked back down the block to the forensics lab. Come by after five? For drinks? Did that mean what she thought it meant? She shook her head. No, they were over the relationship thing. They’d broken up nearly two years ago. And he’d never asked her out for drinks or anything social in all that time.

  “He wants you back,” Will said.

  Carina laughed, dismissing Will’s comment. How did her partner always seem to know what she was thinking?

  “No word on Thomas?”

  “The patrol says he hasn’t come back. I have a BOLO on his car. We’ll have another shot at him.” A “be on the lookout” was standard procedure when they wanted to talk to a person but not bring them down to the station or into custody.

  “Let’s find Doug Masterson.”

  Min
or drug offenses and a six-month stint at Descanso for possession of cocaine with intent to sell filled Masterson’s rap sheet. He’d been clean—at least, he hadn’t been caught—for the last two years.

  They had his photo, description, and age—thirty-four.

  After checking out his apartment, his place of work, and known hangouts, they came up empty. No one admitted to seeing him since Sunday afternoon, but his neighbor, a retiree, said he had taken “his girl” up to the mountains for skiing on Sunday and he didn’t expect him back for a couple days.

  Carina had showed a picture of Angie to the neighbor. “Is this Masterson’s girl?”

  “One of them. Not the one he took skiing, though. Don’t know her name, she’s a new one. He goes through those pretty little things like candy.” He grinned, revealing crooked teeth. The smell of cheap alcohol wafted toward the officers. “Yep, Doug has the lookers all over him.”

  In the car, Carina frowned, made notes. “He could have dumped Angie’s body late Sunday night and then left town. But if the neighbor’s right, Masterson couldn’t have killed Angie.”

  “Did you smell the booze? I doubt he knows what day of the week it is, let alone what time Masterson left yesterday. If it was yesterday.” Will picked up the radio and put a BOLO on Masterson.

  Carina’s money was on Thomas. Means, opportunity, motive. The means was a little difficult right now—where would he have kept her?—but he had no alibi for the time she disappeared, and she had dumped him for another loser. More damning was the fact that he’d lied to them.

  “Let’s talk to Abby Ivers again,” she said. She filled Will in on her theory that Abby was hiding something. “We need to be let in on her little secret, or maybe the phrase obstruction of justice will mean something to her.”

  They found Abby at the apartment she shared with Jodi. The girls had another friend, Kayla Nichols, with them. The three of them had obviously been crying.

  Carina wasn’t going to leave the room without knowing what Abby had hinted at earlier. But after fifteen minutes of the run-around with all three girls—Abby, Jodi, and wannabe lawyer Kayla—first denying, then saying it wasn’t important, then saying Angie would roll over in her grave if she knew they’d told, Carina lost her temper.